Every single thing in this country is an homage to everything in the world

The expression “Every single thing in this country is an homage to everything in the world” emerges from a brief exchange between Oscar Fate and a clerk in Santa Teresa, where a cybercafe’s name prompts a conversation about cultural reference. Its sweeping claim expands the clerk’s description of Mexico as a collage into a paradoxical vision of influence that reaches beyond the present, making even the not-yet-real part of the world’s network of tributes.

The Cybercafe and Its Name

Fate finds the cybercafe through a deep-red card, so darkly printed that its lettering is difficult to read. A lighter-red map on the reverse identifies the location. He asks the receptionist to translate the name, and the clerk tells him it is Fire, Walk With Me. Fate recognizes the phrase as the title of a David Lynch film, and the name becomes the hinge between an ordinary search for directions and a conversation about cultural references.

From Collage to Homage

The clerk has seen all of Lynch’s films; Fate has seen only three or four. The clerk considers Twin Peaks Lynch’s greatest achievement, while Fate prefers The Elephant Man, a choice the passage associates with Fate’s feeling of being different from other people. Their exchange makes the cybercafe’s name more than a label: it belongs to a chain of references linking a place in Santa Teresa with cinema and with the distinct experiences through which each speaker encounters it.

When the clerk characterizes Mexico as a collage of diverse, far-reaching homages, Fate’s film reference has become an opening into a broader account of cultural mixture. The clerk’s formulation does not reduce that mixture to a single origin or influence. Instead, it suggests a field in which distinct works and images can be taken up, echoed, and placed beside one another.

The Reach of the Expression

The claim that everything in the country pays homage to everything in the world pushes the collage metaphor beyond Mexico’s borders. Its most striking extension is temporal: the clerk includes things that have not happened yet. Homage here is not confined to conscious imitation of an already completed past; the statement imagines cultural relations reaching toward unrealized events as well as existing works.

That impossible breadth leaves the expression open to more than one scale of reading. It can describe the specific conversation, in which the name Fire, Walk With Me connects Santa Teresa to Lynch’s cinema, or evoke a world where references continually exceed any one national or artistic frame. The scene establishes the claim through an everyday exchange rather than explaining it as a theory, allowing the grand assertion to remain at once playful, expansive, and difficult to delimit.